Exhibition: Pride and Prejudice: The Battle for Betjeman's Britain

This exhibition looks at the loss of great Georgian and Victorian buildings to both bombs and developers in the years before, after and during World War II, how a small band of people - including poet John Betjeman - campaigned to save them, and how today's system of ‘listing' the best old buildings emerged from the ruins of the Blitz.

It includes surviving fragments and rare photographs of some of the worst heritage losses of the mid-20th century including Robert Adam's Adelphi Terrace (1768-62) near the Strand, the Pantheon entertainment rooms (1772) on Oxford Street and Euston Arch (1837) in London as well as an elegant Georgian terrace in Exeter.

The exhibition also focuses on how the bombing of British cities during the war raised awareness of the nation's old buildings and how different schemes - Recording Britain, the National Buildings Record, and the Ministry of Works' Salvage Scheme - created inventories of the places most worth preserving. After the war, these provided the basis for the listing of buildings of special architectural and historic interest, a system which still continues to safeguard our heritage today.